In the plaza before the Knesset, a thin line of mourners slowly passed the flag-covered coffin of Ariel Sharon. An old man in a long white beard and big black kippah saluted. Another old man brought a single rose. Yet another came wrapped in a giant Israeli flag. Among them were veterans of Sharon’s commando Unit 101 from the 1950s, the armored and infantry units he commanded in Sinai in 1967, the paratrooper brigade he led across the Suez Canal in 1973 to win the Yom Kippur War. The cold, depleted Jerusalem afternoon belonged to them.

I had expected multitudes. But Israelis had gotten used to Sharon’s absence; if anything, his release from the body after eight years of coma came as relief. Still, some of us felt the need to personally say goodbye and thank the man who had devoted his life to trying to keep the Jews safe. That I would join a mourning procession for Ariel Sharon would have once seemed to me inconceivable. Yet there I was, honoring the memory of a man whose impact on Israel I had once regarded as devastating.

The Israel that I moved to as a new immigrant in the summer of 1982 was the Israel of Ariel Sharon. As defense minister, he had just led Israel in the invasion of Lebanon, the first war Israel had initiated without a sense of impending existential threat. It was a summer of firsts. For the first time, Israel was besieging and bombing an Arab capital—Beirut. For the first time, Israel was fighting an asymmetrical war against terrorists embedded in urban neighborhoods, and the civilian casualty rates were rising.

And for the first time, Israelis were failing to unite behind a military operation; in fact, it was actually inciting the deepening divisions between them. Entire reservist units would return their equipment after coming back from stints in Lebanon and proceed directly to demonstrations in Jerusalem. Israelis shouted at each other on the streets, denouncing political opponents as enemies of the Jews, betrayers of Jewish history. In Sharon’s Israel, existential fears, rather than being directed at external enemies, were now directed against one’s fellow Israelis. Left and right agreed: The greatest danger facing the country came from the rival camp.

And then—Sabra and Shatila, the massacre by Israel’s Phalangist Christian allies of hundreds of Palestinians in Beirut refugee camps. No, Israel wasn’t directly responsible, and Sharon wasn’t the murderer that left-wing Israelis accused him of being. Yet somehow the massacre seemed a fitting culmination of Israel’s most sordid war. But it didn’t end there. On Feb. 10, 1983, the Kahan Commission, appointed by the government to investigate Sabra and Shatila, found Sharon guilty of negligence and recommended removing him as defense minister.

That night, Peace Now demonstrators marched to the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem, where the Cabinet was meeting in emergency session. I heard a bulletin on the radio: A grenade had just been thrown at Peace Now demonstrators, and one protester was dead. I rushed to the scene. There was still blood on the pavement. Though the Peace Now protesters had dispersed, several right-wing counter-demonstrators lingered, chanting slogans in support of Sharon, as if nothing had happened.

A Jew was killed here tonight, I said. Who sent you here, one of them replied, Shimon Peres? His friends laughed. What demons, I wondered, were being unleashed—however inadvertently—by Ariel Sharon?

***

Today, though, I mourn Sharon as one of our greatest leaders. I voted for him as prime minister and came to see him as the leader of my camp: the Israeli center. However improbably, Sharon, stalwart of the right, was the first Israeli politician to intuit the end of the country’s left-right schism and its replacement with a new centrist majority that agrees with the left about a two-state solution, but also agrees with the right about the absence of a credible Palestinian partner for peace.

In early 2001, when Sharon took over as prime minister, terror attacks were happening on an almost daily basis; for the first time since 1948, the home front had become the actual front. Israelis avoided congregating with fellow citizens, fearful of attracting suicide bombers. The experts insisted there was no military solution to this level of terror. Sharon insisted otherwise.

As an elder statesman, Sharon had learned the lessons of his failures in the Lebanon War. He understood that a democracy cannot win against terrorists unless its people are united. And so Sharon set about ensuring that, this time, the entire country, from left to right, would support him in war. He did so, initially at least, by holding his fire. As atrocity followed atrocity, Sharon remained oddly, maddeningly, restrained. A suicide bomber killed close to two dozen young Russian immigrants in a Tel Aviv discothèque, and still Sharon failed to act decisively.

What’s happened to the old Arik, frustrated Israelis wondered. Restraint can also be a form of strength, Sharon replied enigmatically. Even left-wing Israelis began demanding that Sharon respond—and that was precisely what he was waiting for. He found his moment with the Passover Massacre—the terror attack on a Seder in the Park Hotel in April 2002 that left 30 dead and injured 140 more. Sharon mobilized the army, and the response was overwhelming: Many reservists who weren’t called up appeared anyway, demanding to fight. Within two years the Intifada was over. It was arguably Sharon’s greatest victory. And he won it by recognizing that effective use of power depends on forging national consensus.

Sharon’s life is the story of the Jewish return to power. Born before WWII, he was the child created by Jewish extremity. His excesses, and his correctives, reflect our collective struggles in search of balance, as we moved from the Holocaust to sovereignty and then to seemingly endless siege. Sharon divided and united, built and destroyed—and he sometimes destroyed what he himself built. The father of the settlements was the only Israeli leader to dismantle settlements—twice, in Sinai in 1982 and then in Gaza in 2005, thereby proving that only the pragmatic right could effectively challenge the ideological right. He initiated the founding of the Likud in 1973, convincing disparate right-wing parties to join together in a coalition that eventually unseated the Labor Party. And then, as prime minister, when the Likud failed to support his planned withdrawal from Gaza, he turned against the party he had created and formed a new rival, the centrist party Kadima—Forward.

In fact there was a pattern behind those seeming contradictions. Sharon was not a peacemaker; his mission was to teach the Jews how to survive in the Middle East. He was the leader who showed us a way out of Israel’s dilemma—an inability to maintain the occupation and an inability to find a worthy partner for peace. That was the real significance of the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza: Israel would determine its own borders, without waiting for an illusory partner. What left and right never quite understood about Sharon was his essential pragmatism. Whatever he believed would make Israel safer, better able to survive as the lone non-Arab state in the region, became absorbed into his worldview.

I asked my friend Arik Achmon, a lifelong member of the Labor Party who served with Sharon in the paratroopers beginning in the 1950s and whose story I told in my recent book Like Dreamers, what he most admired about his former commander. Achmon executed Sharon’s daring and successful plan to cross the Suez Canal during the Yom Kippur War in 1973, bitterly opposed Sharon’s settlement building, and finally advocated for the idea of unilateral withdrawal from the territories that Sharon himself implemented. “The louder people around him talked, the quieter his tone became,” Achmon replied. “His very presence in battle calmed the atmosphere.”

***

Like this article? Sign up for our Daily Digest to get Tablet Magazine’s new content in your inbox each morning.

Thank You!

Moshe Dayan, General Avraham Yaffe, and Ariel Sharon, 1968. "When most generals and army personnel see a photographer, and they are not in stress, they don’t mind stopping for a minute until they hear the release of the shutter — then they know that their image is becoming history."

Sharon and Dayan on the west bank of the Suez Canal, Yom Kippur War, October 1973. "Dayan and Sharon were on an APC, an Armored Personnel Carrier, patrolling next to the bridgehead of the crossing of the Israeli forces, and I was walking. They saw me, and as both of them knew me personally, they stopped and said, ‘Why don’t you jump on?’ So I traveled with them for an hour or so and took a few frames. They both were in a good mood, because they were on the winning side. That was the shift in the mood during the October war."

Sharon with Dayan in the Sinai, Yom Kippur War, October 1973. "As far as I know, and the story was told over and over again, when riding in his APC, his Armored Personnel Carrier, from one side of the Suez to the other, the person driving the vehicle stopped and Sharon bumped his head into the rim. There are various versions of this story, but he was not hit by shrapnel or a shell, it was just from a stop of his tank. One of the soldiers immediately grasped the photographic quality of the white bandana."

Sharon with Prime Minister Menachem Begin, 1977. "This is the visit to the West Bank settlement of Kadum and the inauguration of a synagogue there as a part of a political presence, a public statement that ‘We are here on the West Bank.’ It was part of this settling ideology. Everybody was aware that this was a staging of a strong, stern political statement."

Sharon in the West Bank, late 1979. "When Sharon had important guests, especially from abroad, he always made a tour for them, and it so happened that on this day he had an important group of visitors who were political and financial supporters, and he took them for a tour of a planned settlement. This is him explaining the strategic breadth between the Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, and how it will all be full of settlements."

Sharon, 1980. "He believed in doing. And of course he had an obvious horizon, a set of goals, but I don’t think he was a great believer. He was a doer."

Sharon becomes Minister of Defense, 1981. "He was definitely a complex personality, like many human beings. He also had, beside his very strong and even aggressive personality, he definitely had his soft points."

Sharon with General Amos Yaron and General Yossi Ben Hanan, 1982. "This was taken in the Lebanese Gendarmerie office, and among the officers there are also some Lebanese gendarmes. In 1982 there was the so-called — ironically — Peace for Galilee Operation, when the Israeli army came to assist the Phalangists in Lebanon. We were there at the moment that Sharon met with Lebanese Christian forces. In this moment he discussed things with his generals, especially Amos Yaron, and of course he understood the historic moment of him posing in an official office of the Lebanese forces. This was definitely a very contested move by Sharon, because actually he told Begin and the government that the Israeli forces will stop 40 kilometers after the Israeli border – and that there was no intention to conquer Beirut or Lebanon. But this is political, and I am a photographer."

Sharon at his family ranch in the Negev, 1989. "Once Sharon agreed to stop for the camera – that’s what I’d like to call it - even when I visited him on his ranch, he acted for the camera and enjoyed the game and tried to make the best impression. He liked very much to play it big. ‘Here is Lily cooking in the kitchen.’ ‘This is my bull.’ ‘This is my ox, these are my trees.’ But it was totally authentic. Look, that was his background, he was a farmer and his father was a farmer."

Sharon with Jews attempting to settle in a Christian hostel in East Jerusalem, 1990. "This was one of the very strange adventures which he supported. It was a very controversial move by the settlers, who seemingly bought a building in the Christian quarter, and wanted to settle it. I was not invited, but I think I was trying to cover it because it was in the news. I was there to cover what was evolving. I don’t think anybody had an interest in inviting the media. And then the settlers were ousted."